4 years ago
Immediately after being declared the 46th President-elect of the US, Joe Biden said he will get to work. Making the Covid-19 pandemic his first priority, Biden on Monday will announce a 12-member task force to deal with the virus.
Reports said Vivek Murthy, the Indian-origin former US Surgeon General in the Barack Obama administration, will co-chair the team. It will provide a blueprint for implementation on January 20, 2021, when Biden will be sworn in.
“That plan will be built on a bedrock of science. It will be constructed out of compassion, empathy, and concern,” Biden said in his victory speech on Saturday in Delaware.
Murthy will co-chair the task force with David Kessler, a former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, and Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, a Yale University professor. The team will have 12 members.
The task force announcement will kick off a busy week that will see Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris moving forward with the presidential transition on a number of fronts, with Biden turning to the task of building his administration before the inauguration.
On Sunday, his transition team launched a new website, BuildBackBetter.com, and a new social media handle, @transition46, to provide the public with information on the handover. It lists four priorities for a Biden-Harris administration: Covid-19, economic recovery, racial equity, and climate change.
“The team being assembled will meet these challenges on Day One,” it said.
Biden spent much of his election campaign criticizing President Donald Trump’s handling of the pandemic. The US is seeing record daily infections.
Biden is also expected to issue a clutch of executive orders reversing some of Trump’s controversial measures, such as returning to the Paris Accord on climate change, resume funding of World Health Organization, rescinding the travel ban on people from certain Muslim-majority countries, and reinstating protections for undocumented immigrants brought as children, according to the Washington Post.
